Intel Core i7-4790K Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
The 4790K boosts the base clock speed a healthy 500MHz over last year’s Core i7-4770K, while improving OC potential and keeping pricing constant. For content creators and the benchmark-minded, this chip is one of Intel's best balancers of speed and price. Read More…

What We Liked…

Significantly faster than 2013’s top Haswell chip, the Core i7-4770K, at the same price

What We Didn’t…

Will likely require a new motherboard, despite using the same LGA 1150 socket

Only moderate overclocking potential with our review chip

Intel Core i7-4790K Review

Table of Contents

Introduction

The last couple of years have been lean ones for enthusiasts looking for new innovations in high-end desktop processors before they buy. AMD has been neglecting its high-end FX desktop-CPU line to focus on lower-end FM2 and FM2+ accelerated processing units (APUs, the company's name for its combined CPU/GPU chips). Intel, meanwhile, left the mainstream motherboard business last year to focus on lots beyond its Core desktop chips: attempting to gain mobile market share in tablet and smartphone processors, developing the Next Unit of Computing (NUC) mini-PC platform, and making inroads in all-in-one desktops. And recent high-end Intel chips, from the 2013 Core i7-4770K (part of the 4th-Generation "Haswell" line) to the $1,000, six-core Core i7-4960X Extreme Edition (a.k.a. "Ivy Bridge-E") felt more like performance bumps than anything radically fresh and new.

Lately, though, things have gotten a bit more interesting. In May 2014, Intel launched an updated motherboard chipset, the Z97 Express, with support for new high-speed storage options such as M.2 and SATA Express. Motherboards built around Z97 silicon will work with any 4th-Generation Core/Haswell CPU, but they’re really most relevant today for use with Intel’s very latest processors, code-named "Devil’s Canyon." Z97 boards are also projected to work with forthcoming 5th-Generation Core CPUs, code-named "Broadwell," allowing for a nice bit of future-proofing. Thinking much about Broadwell is jumping the gun, though. We're only looking at the first of the Devil's Canyon 4th-Generation chips here: the Core i7-4790K, which should go on sale June 20.

The Core i7-4790K sports the same architecture as the Core i7-4770K, so don’t expect dramatically different performance or features versus last year’s Haswell desktop chips. The Core i7-4790K drops into the same LGA 1150 socket as previous Haswell CPUs, although if you have an existing Intel Z87-based motherboard, there’s a good chance you’ll have to upgrade it to a newer Z97 offering if you want to install the Core i7-4790K. Intel says the Devil’s Canyon chips were built for Z97, and when we wrote this in mid-June 2014, only Asus had announced a BIOS update for its existing Z87 boards to enable support for the Devil’s Canyon chips. Unless you have one of these boards, you'll want to check your existing motherboard's support pages before buying one of the new Devil's Canyon chips, unless you’re also planning on picking up a new Z97 motherboard, as well.

So, with the same Haswell architecture as previous chips, the same Intel HD Graphics 4600 integrated graphics silicon built in, and accompanied by a new chipset that’s focused mostly on next-generation storage and support for future chip families, what does the Core i7-4790K offer for those focused primarily on processor advances?

For starters, the Core i7-4790K has a base stock clock speed of 4GHz. That’s a first for Intel in mainstream consumer chips, and it's 500MHz faster than the stock-clocked Core i7-4770K. A half-a-gigahertz speed bump is nothing to sniff at, and the Core i7-4790K performs about as we’d expect at stock speeds compared to previous-generation chips with the same number of cores and threads. (That's four and eight, respectively; the Core i7-4790K supports Intel's core-doubling Hyper-Threading technology.) It’s worth noting, though, that Intel had to bump up the thermal design power (TDP) rating a bit, to 88 watts (versus 84 watts on the Core i7-4770K) to hit those clock speeds. So if you have an older cooler that was only borderline effective with the Core i7-4770K, make sure it can handle a little extra heat.

The other upgrade Intel has made to its Haswell refresh chips has nothing to do with internal chip hardware. Intel has revisited the thermal interface material—the layer that lies atop the chip die and conducts heat away from it—that it used on last year’s Haswell chips; many have blamed it for the lackluster overclocking abilities of some of those chips. Intel says the new "Devil's Canyon" chips sport a “Next-Generation Polymer Thermal Interface Material” between the die itself and the chip’s cover plate, and the company expects the new stuff will help deliver better overclock abilities to enthusiasts. In our multiday tests, we didn’t see huge overclocking potential in our testing of the chip, but as always, overclocking abilities can vary widely from chip sample to chip sample.

Still, given the substantial base clock-speed boost versus last year’s Core i7-4770K, and the fact that Intel is keeping the same MSRP of $339 between the two chips, we found little to complain about with this new Haswell flagship chip. It’s a great balance of high-end performance, reasonable power consumption, and price.

Table of Contents

Intel Core i7-4790K

Our Verdict:
The 4790K boosts the base clock speed a healthy 500MHz over last year’s Core i7-4770K, while improving OC potential and keeping pricing constant. For content creators and the benchmark-minded, this chip is one of Intel's best balancers of speed and price.

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